With respect to the electric power grid, expensive peak power—electric power delivered during periods of peak demand—can cost substantially more than off-peak power. The electric power grid itself has become increasingly unreliable and antiquated, as evidenced by frequent large-scale power outages. Grid instability wastes energy, both directly and indirectly, for example, by encouraging power consumers to install inefficient forms of backup generation.
Clean forms of energy generation, such as wind and solar, suffer from intermittency. Hence, grid operators are reluctant to rely heavily on these sources, making it difficult to move away from standard, typically carbon-intensive forms of electricity.
The electric power grid contains limited inherent facility for storing electrical energy. Electricity must be generated in a balanced fashion to meet uncertain demand, which often results in either over or under commitment or dispatch of generation, hence system inefficiency, system insecurity and power failures.
Distributed electric resources, en masse can provide a significant resource for addressing the above problems. However, current power services infrastructure lacks provisioning and flexibility that are required for aggregating a large number of smallscale resources (e.g., electric vehicle batteries) to meet medium- and large-scale needs of power services.
Classical dispatch of energy, (i) is cost based with centralized generation, (ii) is passive with static demand, (iii) has inaccurate parameters, (iv) has manual re-dispatch to relieve grid security violations, (v) uses ad-hoc forward scheduling that is disconnected from real time dispatch, (vi) designed only for rather normally inter-connected system operation and (vii) is limited in forensic analysis.
Thus, significant opportunities for improvement exist in the electrical sector. Real-time balancing of generation and load can be realized with reduced cost and environmental impact. More economical, reliable electrical power can be provided at times of peak demand. Power services, such as regulation and spinning reserves, can be provided to electricity markets to stabilize the grid and provide a significant economic opportunity. Technologies can be enabled to provide broader use of intermittent power sources, such as wind and solar.
There is a need for methods and system tools that merge different load forecasts for power grid centers. There is a further need for methods and system tools that integrate individual load forecasts are into a composite load forecast to present a comprehensive, synchronized and harmonized load forecast. There is a further need for methods and system tools to merge different load forecasts for power grid centers that allows an operator to review input load forecasts and modify load forecasts with an override capability. There is another need for need for methods and system tools that merge different load forecasts for power grid centers and improved load forecasts are provided over different time horizons.